The Friday Article Roundup
You wouldn't keep out the best pop culture writing of the week, would you?
This week, you will open up to:
Send articles throughout the next week to magpiesmedia [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
Carrie Frye considers the specific New England vibe of Salem’s Lot at Flaming Hydra:
King had been teaching Dracula at school, he told Bicks, and one night, when he and Tabitha were having dinner with an old friend, their conversation turned to the vampire classic. What would happen if Count Dracula returned, not to London, but to rural America? The novel he wrote from the idea is scary in the best pulp horror tradition and sometimes hauntedly beautiful. It’s also funny, like in one scene where the old men at the general store silently observe Straker—cosmopolitan, bald, known to say “ciao”—load up on groceries. He departs, his car drives away, growing small in the distance. Finally, one of the old men speaks: “Peculiar fella.”
At Splice Today, Alex Lei ponders whether the messaging is taking over from the medium:
…media is, more and more, designed around metatextual content (i.e. the content that spurs from the work itself, like posts on social media) rather than primacy being given to the content of the test itself. “Viral” advertising is older than the medium itself, but things like Hitchcock banning late admissions to Psycho or any of the parlor tricks William Castle pulled were different than the phenomenon we have now. In those cases, the point was to experience the work.
Lindsay Adler reports on the downplayed politics of Turnstile’s Washington Monument concert at Forever Wars:
Despite raising more than a quarter-million dollars for humanitarian relief, Turnstile’s performance has been covered as a local interest and music story. This is, instead, a cultural moment in which one of the most popular bands in the United States utilized its influence to raise money — and awareness — of the multiple genocides that are being materially supported through American tax dollars. They are, undoubtedly, the cool kids of popular music today, and they asked their devotees to see political resistance as something that is accessible, important, and maybe a little bit fun.
For Criterion, Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay consider the portrayal of transness in Jame Gumb and The Silence Of The Lambs:
Although there’s no strong consensus within the trans community as to whether the character is actually trans, or worth the trouble of reclaiming, the public perception of Jame when the film came out was of a trans character, and the harmful ramifications that perception has had for trans women are an inescapable element of the film’s legacy. For their part, when adapting Thomas Harris’s novel, Demme and screenwriter Ted Tally distanced themselves from the idea of the character as trans, giving Hannibal Lecter the line (based on a similar one in the novel) “Billy’s not a real transsexual, but he thinks he is. He tries to be. He’s tried to be a lot of things, I expect.” Whether it was Harris’s intention to portray Jame as a disturbed fetishist or somebody more complicated to pin down is also unclear. Nonetheless, there is complexity to what is objectively a deeply negative film image. In the depths of Jame’s depraved actions, which were inspired by those of real-life serial killers, it’s possible to discover some authentic reflections of a trans person put into a state of total crisis.
And at Crimereads, Radha Vatsal interviews Noah Segan about the crooks — and looks — of his new film The Only Living Pickpocket In New York:
John had a lovely relationship, still does with Zegna, which is a very storied, old school, Italian, beautiful clothing company designer. And they had convinced him to walk a fashion show in Milan. And he wore a coat that was not dissimilar from this… But Cailee Breneman, who’s our costumer, started working with Zegna, talking to them about a look that could incorporate the vibe of that coat. They found this fabric that’s black and white, which I thought was very evocative of Harry to have a monochrome guy in a colorful world—to talk about the duality of our environment.
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The Friday Article Roundup
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The Friday Article Roundup
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What can art do when the world is ending?
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The Friday Article Roundup
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Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Five, Episode Nineteen, “The Wheel of Fire”
It’s so consistent with this season that it kicks up a notch whenever it becomes about Lyta, to the point that scenes in this episode driven by Lyta but without her present are still awesome. She’s the one driven by a single goal that forces change, especially for everyone else; I like the idea of G’Kar deciding to be a space age Jules and walk the universe. Even Garibaldi’s arc about his alcoholism picks up in response to her, as he tries to work with her to deal with his situation.
The whole “Delenn is pregnant” thing is, you know, whatever, although there’s something risible in it being entirely on Sheridan and not a shared moment of joy for them, particularly when we see her more rational later.
The Dark Half
A solid adaptation that benefits from Romero’s well-honed sense of physical decline and rot: the makeup effects on Timothy Hutton are both excellent and uncanny, and that gleaming bone in his cheek is going to haunt me for a while. This correctly keeps a number of lines from the book that go very hard, and I’m unsurprised no one could bring themselves to cut one particular excerpt of George Stark’s writing. Good cast (Ed Harris is fine in Needful Things, but I wish Rooker could have carried on as Pangborn). Good birds. Horror home cooking.
I need to check this out, I’ve long thought it was likely a mid-tier version of a mid-tier book but this is still Romero and King here, like you say sometimes comfort food is what you want.
Night Of The Hunter — I watched this many years ago and I think was expecting a straight horror piece at the time so the oddness didn’t land, rewatching now it’s obviously a singular vision and it made me think of It’s A Wonderful Life, completely inverted — despite IAWL’s supernatural nature it is rational at its core, actions cause other actions. NOTH is a fairy tale, a dream, actions are not disconnected from consequences but they also drift on other logic. The Spoons and particularly Ivey Spoon are remarkably malevolent in their enforcing of an order that contradicts what is actually in front of them, destroying a woman they’ve presumably known for years at the behest of a charming stranger. Mitchum’s performance goes from subtle to enormous to cartoonish and never feels wrong and Gish is remarkable, unwavering in intent but adaptable to a situation, confident in her abilities and humbled by others’, awe-inspiring in her clarity on the porch and protecting her charges. There is a throughline from her to Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona and of course Mattie in True Grit, the Coens have never been shy about how much influence this movie has over them and that was hugely apparent here. But Gish’s famous (and Coen-bit) line, that children are men at their strongest and they abide, stuck out too — the Coens are so often interested in men and women at their weakest, perhaps this speaks to the near-absence of children as real characters in their movies. But maybe they can’t find someone like Billy Chapin, who does a lot with quiet worry and adult calculation, which makes his breakdown at the end all the more awful. You can only abide so long.
The Lowdown — while the particulars of season 1’s ending were well-done the broad strokes (in terms of a choice Lee was going to have to make) were pretty visible from the start. So it’s interesting that season 2 isn’t letting that choice lie still, it’s still eating at Lee in increasingly obvious ways. I am remaining skeptical of the material with Tommy Lee Jones, which is coming at an interesting moment in the “child-cutting-off-parents” discourse — the show seems to be pushing more nuance than it has justified so far. None of this is a criticism of Jones himself, he’s great and the throwaway bit of him selling Herbalife back in the day is a fantastic little detail. The casting remains the show’s peak and it is currently acting as a Parks and Rec rehabilitation service — Kirk Fox aka Sewage Joe gets a very fun appearance in the most recent episode but Paul Schneider is truly great as a schlub, embittered but deep down aware that he really is the loser he says he’s not and unable to find a way out of this. Mark Brendanawicz gone to seed doesn’t cover it, he’s a Drive-By Truckers song (or maybe a Zevon one) come to funny, terrible life.
If I lived somewhere with a lot of cool movie people Halloween parties, Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter would absolutely be my go-to easy Halloween costume. It’s been too many years since I’ve seen this; I should revisit it this Noirvember.
And I really need to get back to The Lowdown and start S2. I was going to do that anyway, but if I’d been on the fence at all, that DBT reference would have sold me.
Over the last week I did my annual franchise watch for Spooky Season and this year was watching all four Critters movies. And though they’re a mixed bag when they’re really going it’s just plain fun stuff that I really enjoyed. Plus fun to see Leo Dicaprio in his film debut and already showing what’s going to make him a star. And then in 4 we go to space and we get Angela Bassett and Brad Dourif being their usual awesome selves and it’s such cozy horror comedy.
What did we read?
Lenin: A Biography, Chapter Fifteen, Robert Service
Strikes break out and the Romanovs are deposed, and Lenin is ecstatic, returning to Russia to lead the Bolsheviks in person. It’s fascinating that he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t need to be surrounded by the practicalities to feel energised. Humourously, Service notes an incident when travelling in which Lenin organises the smokers using the toilet, and expands this to show his general political beliefs i.e. a centrally organising system of rationing.
When Lenin gets in, he becomes a firebrand with charisma that specifically comes from clarity of vision; the payoff of all that thinking and writing for a decade or more. At the same time, Service notes that while Lenin sticks to his core principles (which most Bolsheviks find shocking), he also hedges his language, cutting down on politically troubling slogans in order to unite the Bolsheviks around him.
Yargo, Jacquelline Sussan
Like a lost episode of The Twilight Zone. This was the first novel of the woman who wrote Valley of the Dolls and other more realistic stories drawing from her life, which makes this science fiction story of alien abduction (written in 1956!) all the more interesting. Its central question is that age-old question of Emotion vs Logic, but attacked from a slightly different angle; the narrator is a young woman faced with a society based entirely around the purging of emotions, and so her interests and the specific construction of the alien society feel more drawing from women’s experiences.
For example, one major aspect of the worldbuilding is that the aliens give up their babies to, essentially, orphanages as a natural basis of things. It runs under a few principles: children really ought to be raised by people who want to raise children rather than doing it out of cultural expectation; people who just want to have sex and not raise kids ought not to be forced to; people who want kids but don’t want to have sex can do so easily. This is just one example of the book’s take on the concept, but it speaks to the different angle it attacks them from.
By comparison, the protagonist Janet is based entirely around the fulfilment of emotion. She’s an ordinary young woman who had dreams of being an actress but is falling into an ordinary life, and her relationship with the aliens is almost immediately antagonistic, because she takes insult at every opportunity and is deeply frustrated by every inconvenience (understandably so, when it comes to the abduction – an accidental case, as the aliens were aiming for Einstein or Bouchant in order to solve a problem with the sun). Sussan, I think, leans much more to the alien perspective, but still takes Janet and her attempts to teach the aliens emotion very seriously.
Dracula by Bram Stoker – for some reason this took me a while to get through, but I loved it. Perfect October reading! In the early going I was charmed by Jonathan’s descriptions of local cuisine as he travelled into deepest Transylvania, then I was delighted by the way Stoker writes regional dialects and accents (including Van Helsing’s quirky way of speaking) and as the horror grew I loved how visceral and gnarly it became – the scene where Dracula uses Renfield to talk himself into the building is particularly great, hell yeah.
The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due
Technically, I finished this last week, but I haven’t posted any reading updates in months, so I wanted to mention this very strong horror novel. Due had a relative who died in the Dozier School for Boys, and the later revelations of the abuses that unfolded there prompted her to write this Southern Gothic social horror novel that is bleak but also almost compulsively readable.
Robert Stephens Jr., a young Black boy in the Florida, gets arrested–he kicks an older white boy who had sexually harassed his sister and then shoved him–and sentenced without trial to several months in the titular reformatory. It is, of course, deeply haunted, and Due takes that haunting in stride (many of the people in Robert’s town accept the reality of haints, for example). Sometimes it’s a source of horror on its own, but it’s also a sign of horror–all those boys, dead from violence and neglect–and the catalyst for more–the Warden, a well-realized sadistic psychopath who’s nevertheless quite human, realizes Robert’s talent for spotting haints and enlists him as an agent to dispatch them, which gets Robert involved in a kind of heating-up cold war between the Warden and one particular vengeful spirit. Meanwhile, Robert’s older sister, Gloria, tries her best to make connections and bring him home: first legitimately, and then any which way she can.
The social horror here is well-developed and chilling, and the ghosts and villains are all well-done, too, putting Robert and Gloria between an inhuman rock and a human hard place and pressing in and in to raise the tension. (If this ebbs a bit as it goes on, it’s just because it becomes clear that Due is working towards a happy ending, so I got less worried once there were fewer sympathetic side characters whose fates were still up in the air.) A lot of very good characterization here, and Due is unsurprisingly great at charting the complex, fickle interracial social dynamics in the South, where white people’s responses will swing around like a weathervane depending on any number of factors that the exhausted, at-risk Black characters are all expected to calculate on the fly.
Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper – Probably not the best book to read while depressed given its pitch-black cynicism about Hollywood (to the extent that I kept thinking “Why don’t you just leave”). Gets stronger in the second half with the rising action and a surprisingly cathartic, hopeful ending that feels earned in part because its based on a real choice.
Finished revisiting Carrie — not only is it a very mean book, it is a weird one. At least a third and approaching half of the text is extra-narrative stuff, book excerpts and hearing transcriptions and new stories, all strategically dropped as foreshadowing/context for the main story — King will use material like this but I don’t think he’s ever done so at such volume since. And the sheer weight of it becomes thematic, more things crowding out Carrie herself from her own story, attempts to understand that are not her own ability to express herself. None of this is particularly difficult fiction but it still feels very weird as a book that became a massive popular hit. The other odd note — King wrote this in 1974 but it’s clearly set in 1979! Unclear why he wanted to pop a few years into the future (and especially when all the details seem stuck in that earlier period), perhaps it is a veiled allegory for the Carter administration.
Been on a big RF Kuang kick this month.
Taipei Story. I got this based on liking Babel and Katabasis, so I did spend the whole story wondering when the clever magic system based on the academic intersection of eastern and western cultures was going to enter the plot, but instead of a got much quieter coming of age story about a summer abroad studying chinese. I liked it. It’s driven by two prongs: the pain of recognition and of distance. The narrator is a first gen Chinese-American who wants to improve her Chinese. There’s very little plot. Seeing herself reflected in the other students as well is painful for her, as is the contrast she sees in the Taiwanese people. Themstically it’s a more stylistically and literarily mature take on the theme of Babel and the ultimate impossibility of translation.
the poppy war trilogy. This fantasy series is not quite YA but not as stylistically mature as Katabasis or Taipei story. It’s a thinly veiled fantasy retelling of the century of humiliation. A little bit of three kingdoms stuff too (there’s a major battle at the red cliffs). You have pretty clear stand ins for China, Japan, England/Portugal, Mao, the long march, the Nanking massacre, etc. This has a lot of plot. It’s very propulsive. Behind the history-inspired fantasy plot, there’s this interesting theme about the unleashing of uncontrollable forces
that are both personally
and nationally destructive. It’s not revanchist or saying actually feudalism was good and modernity bad, but there is this chestertonian conservative streak about how even if these liberatory forces of history were justified there’s still a cost and you can’t necessarily control it.
If HBO was willing to put a ton of money into this it could be game of thrones with Chinese people. It would be massively successful.